Grow Your Business NOW: 5 Sales Books to Read in 2017

10 Mar Grow Your Business NOW: 5 Sales Books to Read in 2017

If you are like us, you can never read enough because you know that professional selling demands constant learning. And, if you are like us, you don’t have enough time to read.

With that challenge in mind (and the end of Q1 rapidly approaching), we have put together a list of our current book recommendations that will be worth your time AND help you grow your business for the remainder of 2017.

(Note: Read all the way to the bottom for a special offer).

#1 – If you are a sales leader who must increase the sales organization’s effectiveness…Read Beyond the Sales Process by Steve Andersen and Dave Stein. It is a true A-Z breakdown of what it takes to build a successful sales organization. It covers both the high-level strategic outcomes and the street-level tactics required to deliver a value-creating journey for your buyers. We like this book so much that we instantly tell people to read it if they are looking for something to challenge their assumptions about how to run a high-performing sales organization. The key questions Steve and Dave provide throughout the book are by themselves worth their weight in gold.

Key insights include:
– The best sales begin before your customer is even buying.
– Your strategy is determined by BOTH your positioning with the customer and your alignment with the customer.
– Validate your impact after the sale beyond just ROI.

#2 – If you are a sales manager who must transform or get out of the game…Read Sales Management. Simplified. by Mike Weinberg. This is an “in the trenches” breakdown of what you MUST be doing as a sales manager. It is both inspiring and incredibly challenging to read because while it will literally get your energy for sales pumping, it will also expose any compromise you have allowed to infect your role as the leader of a frontline sales team. It is also an instant suggestion when sales managers (or people wanting to be sales managers) ask for book recommendations.

Key insights include:
– Sales managers must radically reallocate their time to create a winning sales culture. And they cannot build a sustainable, productive, healthy sales culture without a laser focus on goals and results.
– Sales always follow strategy. Create and drive your strategy before driving the team for sales results.
– Managers should run meetings like sales calls: speak less, listen more.

#3 – If you are a new sales representative who must deliver results as fast as possible…Read The Only Sales Guide You’ll Ever Need by Anthony Iannarino. This book is a one-stop maintenance shop for creating focus and effectiveness immediately. It is incredibly practical and full of ways to identify where you may have gaps. It also has a special emphasis on who you need to be. This is critical because what you do simply won’t matter if you are not the person you need to be. There are free job aids sprinkled throughout the book, with recommended reading at the end of each chapter. Like we said… one-stop maintenance shop.

Key insights include:
– Most of your sales action is completely worthless without optimism. Let someone else play devil’s advocate with your ideas. Your job is to play angel’s advocate.
– Self-discipline, by itself, is your most significant investment in becoming a great salesperson.
– Seriously. You need to spend more time thinking.

#4 – If you are a sales representative who is struggling to get quality leads…Read High-Profit Prospecting by Mark Hunter. If you were to survey 100 sales professionals about where they would like to see immediate results, one of the most common answers would be to become more effective in prospecting. That is because too many people are approaching the discipline of prospecting the wrong way. Mark Hunter explores every single aspect of prospecting in today’s economy in a way that will not just increase your prospecting success rate, but will increase your profitability at the same time. And Hunter’s seven strategic questions regarding your prospecting process (on p. 31) is an absolute gem.

Key insights include:
– A mistake far too many salespeople make is failing to identify the characteristics of perfect customers and then working backward to determine their perfect prospects.
– The amount of time you need to devote to your prospecting process must be at least three times the length of the normal customer acquisition process.”
– The type of leads you will get will determine the price you will get.

And last but ABSOLUTELY not least…

#5 – If you are a sales professional at ANY level who must radically improve your customer conversations to close more deals…Read The Power of Problemsby Tim Ohai and Brian Lambert (and yes, that is us). This book is our latest production and defines how to be “problem-centric” in a world where being product-centric will get you ignored, rejected, and ultimately unwanted. Our book tackles this topic head on, providing concrete definitions and concepts that you can immediately apply to your business, regardless of industry or geography. If you – or your sales team – must be more relevant in sales conversations, this is the book for you.

Key insights include:
– If there is no problem to solve (or challenge to be addressed), there is no sale.
– Your value is determined by the customer’s relationship to the problem that needs solving. This requires much more than simply identifying a “need.”
– The complexity of the problem should determine your approach. Too many sellers approach every customer problem the same way – and it doesn’t work.

And here is the special offer: the book is FREE.

Seriously, we decided that the message in this book is so important, that we created a free, downloadable eBook. And folks like Dave Stein, Dave Brock, Nancy Nardin, and Jim Keenan have already given it glowing recommendations.

About Us

We are a sales conversation services company that is hyper-focused on the kind of conversations that buyers want to have.
This means that our purpose is to help sales people and sales leaders elevate sales conversations to the right buyers in order to create powerful, relevant client relationships,drive organic revenue growth, and acquire new business.